Court guides lean on Adobe Acrobat Pro for verification, conversion and OCR — but Acrobat Pro is a subscription, and plenty of filers (and all Mac Word users, whose Word has no built-in PDF/A export) need another path. Every step has a free equivalent; the trick is knowing what each one doesn't check.
veraPDF is the industry-supported open-source validator: purpose-built for file-format validation, covering all PDF/A parts and conformance levels plus PDF/UA. It is the reference engine other tools call. Run it (GUI or command line), feed it your PDF and a flavor (e.g. 2b), and it returns a pass/fail report with rule-level detail. Two cautions: it validates the spec, so it will flag things a clerk would never care about; and it validates the file you give it — the file that reaches the clerk must be the same one you validated. Anything that touches the PDF afterwards (redaction, merge, compression) invalidates the check.
This site's checker covers the court-facing questions a validator doesn't phrase: fonts actually embedded, encryption present, prohibited elements (attachments, JavaScript), metadata and hidden content, page size and file size. It runs client-side — nothing is uploaded — which matters for confidential filings. The two tools are complements: veraPDF answers "is this ISO-19005-conformant?", the browser checker answers "will this survive the clerk's workflow?". Run both if the stakes justify it.
| Task | Free path | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Create PDF/A from a document | LibreOffice: File → Export as PDF → check Archive (PDF/A, ISO 19005) and pick the version | Verify afterwards anyway — converters claim compliance validators reject (missing XMP identification, fonts still loose) |
| PDF/A from an existing PDF | PDF-XChange and similar free tools; LibreOffice round-trip | A rasterizing converter destroys searchable text — OCR after, then re-verify |
| OCR without Acrobat | Free OCR websites and applications (the Ninth Circuit's own guide points to them); some scanner drivers OCR at capture | Check the output is genuinely searchable (Ctrl+F a known word) and re-run after any edit |
| Combine / split / reduce size | PDFsam Basic, LibreOffice, print-to-PDF; size reduction via recompression tools | Merging can drop bookmarks and re-encode text layers — see combine & split |
| Remove password / permissions | Re-export from the source application, or print-to-PDF from an unlocked copy — see security removal | Don't strip protection from documents you don't have rights to |